NOTICE: This section is currently a work-in-progress. I’ll be continuously adding various bits and pieces, and you’ll absolutely encounter awkward sentences + spelling/grammar mistakes. Welcome to the slow process of analysis, and enjoy your stay (while it lasts)!
Definitions
When discussing the Big Five, there are several bits of terminology that needs to be understood:
Trait: “Person’s typical style of thinking, feeling, and acting in different kinds of situations and at different times”.1 Traits can be used to predict certain behaviors.
Personality: “Pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior.”2 They’re acquired through life experiences and are relatively stable.
Temperament: “Physical, mental, and emotional traits people are born with.”3
Many consider temperament as a subset of personality.4 However, temperament is considered to have their own model called the CBQ (Children’s Behavior Questionnaire) with the following three traits:
- Negative Affectivity (Neuroticism)
- Surgency Extraversion (Extraversion)
- Effortful Control (Conscientiousness)
Notice the overlap between CBQ and Big Five - we’re only missing openness and agreeableness. However, despite the similarities, we will not be separating personality and temperament, as the Big Five aims to cover personality traits while integrating temperament into the mix.
I’m also going to clarify the definition of extraversion. The Big Five uses Eysenck’s concept of extraversion rather than Jung’s.
Eysenck: Extroverts gain and recharge their mental energy from external stimuli, such as social interaction. Introverts prefer to shield themselves from external stimuli and recharge their mental energy by withdrawing themselves.5
Jung: Extroverts seek action and sensory input from the external world, using their experiences to influence their thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Introverts immerse themselves in their internal environment, through reflection, dreaming, and keeping their ‘head in the clouds’ to influence their actions.6
This clarification may be redundant – many people have only heard of Eysenck’s version of extraversion. However, I still find value in acknowledging Jung, especially because Eysenck built his definition off of Jung’s.
Origins
“Can you find a taxonomy to describe human personality?”
That’s the idea that started the Big Five Personality Test.7 After all, humans were greedy for more, desperate to understand human personality, and longed to map it out qualitatively.
Since the 1880s, scientists have been interested in personality. But, it only became official in 1936 when Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert conducted the first study of personality. They gathered 18000 personality-describing words from the Webster’s Dictionary, then narrowed it down to 4504 adjectives to describe non-physical characteristics. This created the first ‘personality wordbank’ – a ‘formal’ way to describe personality.
Through the work of Cattell, Tupes and Christal, Fiske, Norman, Smith, McCrae and Costa8, and many others, the test has undergone several revisions, expansions, and improvements. However, the purpose and the ideas within the test remain.9
Strengths
There’s a lot of reasons why the Big Five is such a popular test and remains at the forefront of personality research.
- The traits the Big Five measures are relatively stable during adulthood.
As we grow older, our traits are going to naturally develop and change. For example, you tend to have higher conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism, extraversion, and openness. This is mainly because people tend to have more responsibilities (i.e. family, job, etc.) as they age and eventually learn to build traits to adapt. This is called the maturation effect.10
After adolescence, people’s traits tend to stabilize, ensuring there are distinct behavior patterns to analyze. This consistency (leading to replicability) is desirable for scientists.
- Widely accepted by the scientific community
Many scientists have conducted studies to confirm the validity and reliability of the Big Five Personality Test. This includes Krueger and Eaton (2010), Kamarulzaman and Nordin (2012), and Satow (2021). Using confirmatory factor analysis, invariance analysis, and various other empirical tests, studies have shown that the Big Five test can account for “80% of personality variance”11 and is most widely accepted test within this niche.
- Very easily repeatable
Scientists value repeatability. Got a fascinating result? Make sure to do the experiment 2 more times, just in case something was off!
The Big Five test is generally delivered as a 50-question Likert scale test. It can easily be printed and distributed in a similar manner to thousands of participants, ensuring consistency between studies.
- Simplicity and Generalization
As a result of constantly improving the Big Five personality test, the traits we’ve selected are:
- Easy to understand and specific - In English, these traits are clearly defined and simple.
- Mutually exclusive - Makes it easy to quantify.
- Generalizable - These traits are universal and can generally apply to any culture.
Together, these strengths make the Big Five the default when considering personality.
Applications in Society
You can apply the Big Five personality traits to predict future behavior.
A popular example is that high conscientiousness and emotional stability (low neuroticism) are correlated with stronger job performance and higher wages. This information could potentially shape businesses’ hiring and recruiting practices, as they’re already begun to use the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to narrow down the applicant pool.
This has the potential to be a positive addition: Bad hires can cost “up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings” - a significant loss for the business if “46% of newly-hired employees [are] deemed failures”.12 However, since the Big Five personality test is a self-assessment, lying on it becomes a trivial task.
High conscientiousness is also a general indicator for superior academic performance. This is likely because conscientiousness and agreeableness were “positively related with all four learning styles (synthesis analysis, methodical study, fact retention, and elaborative processing)”. It was also concluded that the Big Five “explained 14% of the variance in [a student’s] grade point average” whereas “learning systems explained an additional 3%”, establishing a clear connection between personality traits and learning styles improving one’s academics.13
Certain traits can also correlate with specific learning styles. In a study, the study identified four types of learning styles:
Meaning Directed: Focuses on self-regulated learning and critical information synthesis, developing independent thinking and establishing connections between ideas and concepts.
Reproduction Directed: Focuses on memorizing and rehearsing information, directed by an external figurehead (teacher). Typically, the information is memorized to be reproduced/recalled on a test.
Application Directed: Focuses on understanding and learning to meet certifications of accreditations, focus on real-world application and examples.
Undirected: Enjoys cooperative learning, directed by an external figurehead, has difficulty finding ways to approach their studying and self-regulation.
These learning styles are apart of Vermunt’s Inventory of Learning and has been validated through several studies.14 However, it has fallen out of favor with the public since the introduction of the VARK (visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic).15
The correlations between Big Five traits and VARK learning styles are shown in the table below. A ‘+’ represents a positive correlation, a ‘-’ represents a negative correlation, and a blank cell means that there is no correlation between the two variables.
| Meaning Directed | Reproduction Directed | Application Directed | Undirected | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Extraversion | \(+\) | \(+\) | \(+\) | |
| Conscientiousness | \(+\) | \(+\) | \(+\) | \(-\) |
| Neuroticism | \(-\) | \(-\) | \(+\) | |
| Agreeableness | \(+\) | \(+\) | ||
| Openness | \(+\) | \(+\) | \(-\) |
This connection could potentially allow teachers to better assist struggling students, using different tactics that best suit their needs. For example, neurotic and undirected students could benefit from individual attention or asking other students to form groups and help teach each other the concepts. Teachers could opt for more independent assignments for conscientious students, or give more thorough instructions to students who are more agreeable.
There are also various patterns with Big Five traits and an individual’s health. First, conscientiousness is the strongest predictor for reduced morality — being a conscientious person makes you 30% less likely to die, compared to other people. This is because these people tend to make better health choices, as they’re more likely to stay fit, cooperate when given medical advice, have better sleeping habits, and are less likely to smoke. Conscientiousness is also tied to having more supportive relationships, thriving at work, and having better stress management.16
People with Alzheimer’s typically see a significant decrease in conscientiousness and large increase in neuroticism. Decreases in extraversion, openness, and agreeableness were also spotted. These Big Five traits could assist an early diagnosis for the patient. In addition, Heroin and Ecstasy users showed patterns when testing their Big Five traits. Heroin users had high neuroticism and openness while Ecstasy had high extraversion and openness. Both also had lower agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Mental disorders are also linked to neuroticism – especially during adolescence.
Limitations
Despite the Big Five’s numerous applications in society, rigorous tests for reliability and validity, and general acceptance within the scientific community, there are various criticisms of the test.
Lexical Hypothesis
One of the biggest criticisms of the Big Five test is its basis of lexical hypothesis. Lexical hypothesis assumes that “the most important personality traits are encoded as words…. and that the analysis of [these words] may lead to a scientifically acceptable personality model”.17 Hence, by using language (or for the Big Five, a dictionary) as a resource, researchers can create a list of important personality traits to judge people off of.
People are against the lexical hypothesis for various reasons:
Verbal descriptors result in social bias (i.e. people consciously or unconsciously choose traits that align with what society deems as ‘good’. For example, people might say they’re ‘agreeable’ because society prefers agreeable people more). This can greatly skew the data as extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism become invalid as researchers can not ensure that people will answer honestly and objectively.18
Others also deem personality as ‘too complex’ to be encoded into a singular word or used in everyday language. We may require more detail to fully express what characteristics we want to capture, as language may not be an adequate vessel to describe the human condition and personality. Traits can also be too ambiguous – they could be misunderstood or the meaning of the word could change overtime.
The lexical hypothesis also has little scientific backing. The terms used with lexical hypotheses were developed for daily use, and could represent different meanings/perceptions rather than the definition researchers aim to use. Furthermore, tests to validate the lexical hypothesis are deemed ‘unscientific’.19
(In)correct Approaches
There are two approaches for the Big Five:
Etic: “Traits are universal, regardless of the environment, culture or context”
Emic:”Traits are culture and context-specific”
Often, Big Five studies use the Etic approach, generalizing the results to encompass the entirety of the human population, instead of narrowing their scope.
The Etic (or universal) approach was led by Eysenck, as he emphasized how the Big Five traits are ‘biological’ and universal to every human language, and would appear regardless of one’s culture or environment.20
The Emic (or local) approach believes that the cultures heavily shape personality traits. For example, with the test’s origins stemming from lexical hypothesis, the current model proposes a Western-centric view of personality traits, rather than a holistic view.
Thus, the question becomes: Do you value a generalized and universal model to encompass the entire human condition? Or, do you take a more personalized approach, envisioning how one’s environment can influence their behavior?
Culture Differences
Various cultures, such as Korean, Mexican, Indian, Filipino and Arabic, believe that there are many traits which are very important to them that only exist within their culture. Therefore, if we were to utilize the Etic approach, there may be crucial personality traits that are left out as a result of the Big Five’s Western-centric development.
This belief has been explored in Chinese culture and
This idea has actually been explored by Chinese researchers who replicated the origins of the Big Five test by applying the idea of lexical hypothesis to Chinese. This resulted in a completely different quiz with different traits — Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) — that was tailored for a Chinese audience.21
The Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI), containing four major personality factors:
- Social potency (leadership, divergent thinking, novelty, extraversion)
- Dependability (responsibility, optimism vs pessimism, face22, locus of control)
- Accommodation (Family orientation, self vs society, defensiveness, graciousness, logical vs affective orientation)
- Interpersonal relatedness (individual vs social, harmony, discipline, traditionalism vs modernity)
There is some overlap with the Big Five.
- Societal potency corresponds to extraversion and openness
- Dependability corresponds to neuroticism and conscientiousness
- Accommodation corresponds to agreeableness23
Although there are some similarities, it’s clear that the Chinese do not value the same things as Western audiences. For example, there are many openness-related traits, such as divergent thinking and novelty within the social potency category. However, openness is not a seperate category as it functions “in a complex context than a distinct construct” when compared to the Western environment.24 Furthermore, the CPAI also associates extraversion with openness - these traits tend to be more distinct for Western audiences.
Furthermore, the definition of openness can vary depending on one’s culture. Openness requires breaking free of tradition and embracing new ideas. One must be motivated by aesthetic sensitivity rather than rules — an idea which can be discouraged in Asian cultures. It also begs the question: Is their opinion truly what they think, or were they just taught to think that? If they’re taught to think that, does that matter? Is that part of their personality or just a byproduct of their society?
Issues of an Etic approach are also found in Arabic language and culture when attempting to create a more indigenous test, where differences in results were prominent enough to birth a completely new sixth trait: religiosity.
Religion is the (lack of) belief in a higher power. For various cultures, it’s an incredibly important aspect of their daily lives as it greatly influences their behavior, values, and beliefs as well as your sense of belonging and community.25
Higher religiosity is associated with increased agreeableness and conscientiousness and decreased neuroticism.26 It has been seen that Islamic students who are more committed to their religious teachings and consistently follow religious practices are less likely to cheat during exams and feel higher satisfaction with work, relating to conscientiousness. Higher religiosity is also positively correlated with decreased openness and increased extraversion, the link between these traits are weaker than the other 3 traits.27
Although personality is often “assumed to be the cause of religiosity” rather than a consequence, recent studies refute this point. They believe that religion is more like a two-way street, with religiosity and personality simultaneously affecting each other.28 With studies showing that “religiosity is a larger independent factor” than simply being a part of the other 5 traits and “represents a broad-based motivational domain of comparable breadth”, some researchers believe that its influence should be fully acknowledged by adding religiosity as a 6th trait.29
If religiosity was proposed as a 6th trait, there are various dimensions that it could encompass, such as:
- Basic religiosity, central duties, religious experience, religious knowledge, and orthopraxis.30
- al-rushd (diligence, balance), hijab (caring for one’s good name, abstaining from committing sins, emotional stability), musyawarah (agreeableness, productivity, modesty, equality), Spirituality (prayers, honesty, knowledge)31
However, it should be noted that the relationships between personality and religion are (relatively) small and religiousness has also been correlated with personality traits outside of the Big Five. Hence, more research needs to be done to determine whether it is completely independent32 from the other five traits and is an accurate way of measuring one’s personality.33
Sex Differences
The Big Five Personality Test results also seem to change depending on one’s sex. When collecting results in Turkey, men were “more imaginative and inquisitive” compared to women. This is likely because of the patriarchal culture within Turkey, as they have very strict gender roles; men were able to pursue what they wanted while women were shoehorned into rigid and rule-abiding lifestyles. So, how each sex behaved would be heavily influenced by societal norms.34
We can also see this happen (on a smaller scale) within Western countries when analyzing the stereotypical socialization of girls and boys. In Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Poland, and Russia, men tend to be “more assertive and risk-taking than women”, hence scoring high on extrovertism and openness. This is likely caused by men and boys believing that boldness and dominance is the core of being masculine and are socialized “to be independent and autonomous”.35 Risk-taking is also seen as highly-valued in our current society. We’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of every industry, whether it’s tech, cuisine, or sports — without taking risks and constant innovation, how could you stand out in society and prove your worth?
Women, on the other hand, were more “anxious and tender-minded” while also having higher neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to feelings scores.36 Girls are socialized to be more passive than guys, are expected to be nicer and well behaved and not talk back to people, and are encouraged to share their feelings with their friends (where being more expressive and aware of emotions can be seen as a sign of overreaction or neuroticism).37 All these stereotypes and expectations — even if they were not intended to influence youth — are often encouraged by parents and play a role in how children identify which traits are ‘good’ and ‘bad’, thereby affecting how they act and what they believe.
Expanding this beyond the Western world and analyzing results from 55 different nations, the trend changes slightly: women scored higher in neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness. However, men scored higher in assertiveness and openness. Neuroticism was the most significant difference — women scored significantly higher in 49 out of the 55 nations.38
Socioeconomic factors also influenced gender differences. First, there were larger differences between men and women in healthy, rich, and gender-egalitarian cultures. This is likely because there are higher levels of human development (with better access to education, basic needs, etc.), allowing an individual’s personality to flourish with less constraints.
Furthermore, men in developed world regions were “less neurotic, extraverted, conscientious and agreeable, compared to men in less developed world regions”.39 This is understandable as having a lower socioeconomic status may cause you to worry more about the future and require you to work harder. Furthermore, it may encourage you to build a community of people around to, where you can ask others for help during times of need, requiring you to be more extraverted and agreeable — you need people to like you! Interestingly, women have little variation in their personality based on their socioeconomic status.
However, can you measure and generalize certain traits such as openness and extraversion accurately when it is actively being manipulated by cultural, societal, and evolutionary factors? Currently, studies say that you can! Various researchers have found significant differences in personalities when comparing both sexes and stating “social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations” — perhaps there really is an ‘innate’ personality difference between sexes!40
Lack of Representation
Although this test samples hundreds of locations, it’s not completely representative of the population it claims to show. This is because a majority of our data comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) populations. Less developed countries (such as the ones within Africa) are often glossed over and represent a tiny amount of data points.
A clear example of this lies within the data set that I’ve been analyzing. When we look at the data points on the map (to find trends between countries), it’s clear that much of Africa has been omitted from the data.41 It brings the reliability of the data set into question: can we rely on WEIRD populations to make generalizations and assume it will be correct? Are these results universally applicable?
For the Big Five, studies have shown that non-WEIRD populations do not follow the same trends as WEIRD populations. In fact, for low and middle income countries, Big Five personality questions fail to measure the personality traits they’re built for and have low validity. This is a huge contrast to the high validity discovered in internet surveys from the same low/middle income countries.42
Previously, it has been mentioned that conscientiousness and emotional stability are more correlated with income. It also intuitively makes sense — if you can work hard and have good stress management, workers could perform their job better. Yet, when analyzing non-WEIRD populations, it was seen that conscientiousness was not a predictor for increased income – only emotional stability and openness were. This may actually be an issue with the design of the test as questions attempting to gauge one’s conscientiousness were the least accurate (out of the 5 traits). However, openness questions “poorly differentiate from other items… [so,] one cannot exclude that this result is driven by systematic responses biases” and other external factors.43 One must remain cautious between correlation and causation.
There is also evidence that the Big Five personality test is not valid when surveying rural populations with low levels of education in Bolivia, Colombia, and Kenya, showing the Big Five’s inability to be completely universal.44
During the process of surveying non-WEIRD populations, it should also be noted that errors may have occurred due to the quality of translation (i.e. wording of question, how they are interpreted within a specific culture) via an enumerator to adapt to respondents with lower cognitive ability. Thus, the impact of an enumerator’s face-to-face interactions with respondents should be taken into consideration.45
It was also noted that less educated populations had lower interest in taking the survey, as their incentives and expectations for the survey may be completely different than a respondent in a WEIRD country who is taking the Big Five test for fun.46 This could lead to skewed data.
Despite categorizing respondents (e.g. sex, countries), there still seems to be varying answers rather than a strong, general trend. Assuming that we continue to use an Etic approach, the reliability of the test can be called into question, as there are inconclusive results from many studies.
Variability of Tests
The Big Five Personality Test has dozens of different versions. Some contain 44 questions, some contain 25, 50, or even 60. In addition, each test will use different questions to poll respondents. In non-Western countries, people will also have translators which could twist the meaning of the question (as seen above).
Of course, the test will always attempt to measure the respondent’s personality and there are standardized dimensions within each trait (i.e. the dimension assertiveness within the trait extraversion). However, it’s possible that person 1 taking test version A with 44 questions could receive a different result than if they took test version B with 50 different questions with a translator.
Potential Improvements
In regards to the methodology of the Big Five test, there are various improvements that made.
Zhang, Tse, and Savalei propose to remove the Likert scale format47 and replace it with the Expanded format. The Likert scale often falls victim to acquiescence bias — the tendency to agree with whatever a quiz question asks rather than write their own opinion48 — which could significantly skew test results. This has generally been removed by having an equal amount of ‘positive’ questions (e.g. I have excellent ideas.) and ‘negative’ questions (e.g. I feel little concern for others). However, just because respondents agree to an equal amount of positive and negative questions, it doesn’t mean that the data is valid. In fact, all it does is create “contradictory and uninterpretable answers”.49 Furthermore, interchanging negatively and positively worded questions, especially ones that contain negative particles like ‘not’ or ‘no’ or affixal morphemes like ‘un-‘, ‘non-‘, ‘dis-‘ or ‘-less’, can be confusing for inattentive respondents who briefly glance at the question before answering.
To solve the problems of the Likert scale, they’ve introduced the Expanded format which allows respondents to select answers in the following format:
- I am someone who feels little concern for others
- I am someone who feels somewhat little concern for others
- I am someone who feels slight concern for others
- I am someone who feels a lot of concern for others
The Expanded format reduces ambiguity by explicitly stating the meaning of every answer, removes acquiescence bias by removing the ‘agree’ to ‘disagree’ scale, and reduces confusion regarding negations by forcing respondents to pay attention to the subtube differences between responses. It also should be noted that the Order effect comes into play, where people are most likely to choose an option that is first or last.50
When conducting primary research, it was confirmed that the Expanded format reduced acquiescence bias for the conscientiousness and extraversion questions, producing more accurate results. Furthermore, by using chi-square tests to compare observed and expected results, it was shown that the Expanded format was “generally not affected by Order effect”.51
Openness questions performed mediocrely, primarily due to the fact that the openness Likert questions only have two ‘negatively’ worded questions out of 10 total questions — meaning that the acquiescence bias associated with openness are already quite low. Hence, the Expanded form and Likert version performed equally well.52
However, neuroticism and agreeableness questions performed worse with the Expanded version, as the order effect may have played a larger role with these two traits and made respondents’ results more inaccurate. Agreeableness also tends to be the “second most unreliable and problematic scale”53 as it has low retest reliability and low convergent validity.54 This highlights that agreeableness is not well-defined within the test and could contain other external factors.
DeBell, Brader, Wilson, and Jackman also conducted a study to improve the Big Five TIPI (Ten Item Personality Inventory) assessment, which contains 10 questions to measure the respondent’s Big Five score. TIPI has many advantages — it’s short and both widely accepted and widely used by researchers.55
Figure 1: Original TIPI test
However, there were 3 key issues with the current TIPI that this study aimed to improve.
- Response labels
The TIPI response system requires respondents to input numbers (which correspond to words), rather than use the words themselves. This seems awfully convoluted when respondents can just use words to answer in the first place.
- Agree-Disagree format
This results in acquiescence bias, as mentioned previously.
- All on one page
Since respondents see all the questions at once, they may choose to rush through the quiz to get their result instead of carefully thinking about the questions. This results in respondents satisficing instead of optimizing, as respondents’ answers may be skewed.56
To combat these issues, the researchers decided to change the TIPI into the following format:
Figure 2: Revised TIPI test
They removed the numeric response labels and replaced them with verbal ones, removed the Agree-Disagree format to reduce acquiescence bias, and had questions pop up one at a time to encourage respondents to think more about their answer.
The original and revised TIPI tests were given to 1253 respondents and compared based on completion time, question non-response, paired item reliability, and construct validity. Completion time was identical, with both tests taking an average of 87 seconds each. The original had 12 questions left unanswered (1.7%) while the reversed had 2 questions left unanswered (0.3%).57
The paired item reliability — the higher the reliability, the higher the probability that you are accurately measuring a personality trait — was measured during Person’s r.
| Trait | Original | Revised |
|---|---|---|
| Extraversion | -.23 | \(-.28\) |
| Neuroticism | -0.36 | \(-0.43\) |
| Conscientiousness | -.31 | \(-.46\) |
| Agreeableness | \(-.22\) | -.13 |
| Openness | -.42 | \(-.50\) |
Out of the five traits, only agreeableness was better measured by the original test, showing that the revised version often had more accurate results.58
The study also tested the construct validity — how well a test measures the concept that is not directly measurable, as well as the appropriateness of inferences made using test results59 — for both the original and revised TIPI test.
| Expectation | Result |
|---|---|
| Conscientiousness associated with recycling | Detected only by revised TIPI. |
| Conscientiousness associated with health | Revised effect size 2x larger. |
| Conscientiousness associated with voter turnout, voter registration, and political knowledge | None detected by the original TIPI. All detected by revised TIPI. |
| Conscientiousness associated with political conservatism | Detected only by revised TIPI. |
| Openness associated with political liberalism | Found in both TIPIs. |
| Openness negatively associated with racism | Detected only by revised TIPI. |
| Neuroticism associated with worse health | Revised effect size 2x larger. |
Overall, the revised test was an improvement over the original test for nearly every trait by increasing response rates, reliability, and validity. Hence, by implementing these “costless improvements”, the TIPI test could produce significantly more accurate Big Five test results!60
Spin-off Tests
There are several spin-off tests that were created due to the oversights or limitations of the current Big Five model.
(Alternative) Big Five
The alternative five model of personality (ZKPQ) was created by Zukerman containing the following five basic dimensions:
- Impulsive-sensation seeking
Measures the tendency to act without thinking and one’s liking for novelty, unpredictability, and excitement. Negatively correlates with the Big Five’s conscientiousness trait.
- Neuroticism–anxiety
Measures general anxiety, fear, and emotionality. Positively correlates with the Big Five’s neuroticism trait.
- Aggression–hostility
Measures anger and lack of inhibitory control. Negatively correlates with the Big Five’s agreeableness trait.
- Sociability
Measure social participation and affiliation. Associated with interacting with people and a dislike of isolation. Positively correlates with the Big Five’s extraversion trait.
- Activity
Measures persistence, energetic behavior, and a need to avoid feelings of restlessness. Although it does not have a Big Five trait it’s associated with, studies have suggested that activity and extraversion are positively correlated.61
The main differentiators between the ZKPQ and the Big Five is that there’s no ‘Openness’ trait and Zuckerman bases his model on traits with a “strong biological-evolutionary basis”.
Zuckerman’s model starts out with scales used in psychobiological research, focusing on traits that had comparable behavior in other species. This means including aggression instead of agreeableness and impulsivity vs conscientiousness, as they’re commonly seen. However, openness can not be identified in non-human species, which is why it is not present in this model.62
Hence, by starting with Eysenck’s Big Three (extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism) and integrating measures of temperament (emotionality, activity, sociability, and impulsivity) from Strelau’s Temperament Inventory. In the end, he also added sensation-seeking as a trait, since it has been proved to have high heritability and many psycho physiological and biochemical bases. Measures of cultural interests and intellectual styles were omitted to ensure trait translation between species.63
Due to the goal of species universality, the ZKPQ also exhibits cultural universality for various cultures such as China, Germany, Italy, Spain,64 Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland and the U.S.65 — with some variation in congruence for China and Italy. This means that ZKPQ is incredibly generalizable across humanity — something the Big Five lacks.
HEXACO
Instead of removing a trait, the HEXACO expands the Big Five model by replacing neuroticism with emotionality – with faucets of fearfulness, dependence, and sentimentality — and including another trait called ‘honesty-humility’ (HH). The faucets for honesty-humility include sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance and modesty.66
HH emerged after conducting lexical studies (for lexical hypothesis) in various different languages, such as Dutch, French, Korean, Croatian, German, and more. Furthermore, there were also slight changes in faucets. Quick temper, in the Big Five, would be a sign of high neuroticism. In HEXACO, that would be a sign of low agreeableness. Despite major similarities between these two tests, HEXACO’s lexical studies help increase the accuracy of each trait by better defining the scope of each trait and faucet.
Compared to the Big Five, HEXACO is shown to have more predictive power when determining psychopathic traits, egoism, risk taking, materialism, and unethical business decisions. These results seem a lot more applicable in a business context compared to the Big Five — could this be the future of hiring systems?67
Personally, I find that each model presents a new aspect or has additions that could be considered when evaluating one’s personality. We must be willing to innovate, destroy, and improve previous knowledge to ensure the most accurate data, to contribute and grow our understanding of personality.
Connections to MBTI
rmarkdown::render(‘C:/Users/sophi/OneDrive/Documents/Personal/bigfive/docs/beyond.Rmd’, output_file = ‘C:/Users/sophi/OneDrive/Documents/Personal/bigfive/docs/beyond.html’)
The VARK model has many disbelievers for various reasons. See more here: Hederich-Martínez, C. y Camargo Uribe, A. (2019). Critical Review of J.Vermunt’s Learning Pattern Model. Revista Colombiana de Educación, 77, 1-25. doi: https://doi. org/10.17227/rce.num77-9469.↩︎
You can see how this has affected this data set, most notably with agreeableness and openness.↩︎
The public image you project - your ‘face’ in society.↩︎
Recall that the 5 traits must be independent of eachother to be considered within the Big Five model.↩︎
Recall that I removed any countries that had less than 10 responses to reduce skewing and better visualize the data.↩︎
Where you answer questions from 1 to 5, where 1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree↩︎
I’d actually argue differently (as seen in the data analysis section), but I have no scientific evidence behind my claim.↩︎
Neuroticism ranks first for most unreliable.↩︎